Sick Of Viruses and scams

Sick Of Viruses and scams was Originally Posted on January 7, 2012 by lavarock

I got a call from a customer that he thought he may have a virus on his computer. In looking, we could not find Norton Antivirus, which he used to have.

I drove down there and sure enough, Norton was gon and we don’t know for how long. I looked back a few days in the logs but don’t see anything strange.

The customer had been on an international news site and looked at a video. Then he saw a screen about infections and called me. When I looked at one screen it had a link at the bottom to ANTIVWORLDXP.COM. Looking up that name yesterday showed nothing. I did a domain name lookup and it was registered a few hours earlier from a person in Canada. When looking today, it says it was updated and the owner lived in New York.

Today there is another user who has reported the fake virus site, so at least 2 of us are finding it.

Don’t fall for a page saying that you are infected and should buy software to fix it. Check it out first. Also, don’t fall for a phone call that your system is infected. The guy will have you browse your Windows logfiles (which are known for having cryptic errors in there) and then talk you into downloading their junk.

As an aside I also have been getting spam from what looks like a local online newspaper. They want me to spend $150 a year for an ad in their “mall”. The paper is nothing more than an automated gathering of “news” items which turn out to be things like Facebook postings, etc. They just scrape news and aggregate it. Often the “news” is disjointed and jumbled. If you are a business owner, you may get emails about things like this.

Then there are the companies that look like the yellow pages but are only online and charge hundreds or thousands of dollars to be listed on their website. They use phrases like “If you don’t renew, your customers won’t find your website”.

As a business, I get phone calls (that are really recordings) saying they are an affiliate of Google (which they are not). They want me to pay them to put my website higher in searches.

Then if you have a shopping cart you may get emails from your own site saying “do you ship to , what credit cards do you take and remind me of your website name. These are created from an automated script they run on certain types of shopping carts. If they really were browsing my store they would know my products, prices, shipping areas and would have been able to (in the past minute) remember the name of the website they were on. They are just fishing. Then if I was to reply, they would start the “I want t ouse my own shipper” scam or something similar. perhaps they already have stolen credit cards and need to know which sites take them, so they can quickly scam someone before the card is reported. If you are a small store, they may want to email you the card number. They hope that it will take a few days for you to discover it is bad after you ship the product.

Anyway, many of these scams are obvious if you read between the lines and question every email or popup window you get.

A common marketing ploy is when someone is looking over a product, to get them to answer “which item were you interested in” maneuvering them into a choice, rather than asking IF they are interested in any of the items.

A famous store in the DC area used to offer picture frames at 20-40% off. The sign was there all year long and it turns out they were never offered at the full retail price. They were admonished and froced to raise the price to “retail” for x numbers of weeks before again offering it at 20-40% off.

False advertising is shown in this example. A store wants to sell a hat. Priced at $50 and it does not sell. To get the price-concious consumer, they mark it, “WAS $70, now $50″. If that still doesn’t sell, the store might mark it “Was $100, reduced to $75, now specially priced at $50″. WOW! 50% off, what a deal!

MCI and AT&T and Sprint and the rest used to market their telephone service as cheaper than the competition. The problem is they all based their calculations on the others FULL PRICE and did not compare thir prices against the competitions sale prices.

No wonder we are all confused and scammed.